As I write this, fall—suddenly—is knocking on New England's door. The Red Sox have returned to historic form with their late August dive, the kids are back in school, and evening seems to be arriving earlier by the day. Dreams of late summer weather have given way to hopes of an early frost to kill off disease-carrying mosquitoes. Any day now...

This October 11, at about peak foliage time, IHM will host its first Quality Symposium at MIT's Endicott House in Dedham, MA, just down the street from Meditech's main campus. If you have plans to attend the Meditech CMO Conference on the 12th, please do consider arriving the day before and joining us and some of your colleagues from around the country.

CMOs, VPMAs, Directors of Quality, and their associates will, we hope, find the afternoon/evening program intriguing.

Leaders from a number of IHM affiliate hospitals will participate, including Steve Laverty, CEO of Northeast Health and Eilene Sampanes, System Director, Clinical Performance at Christus Health System. We are pleased that Dr. James Keegan, VP, Clinical Quality at Rapid City Regional Hospital, will be with us as well.

Charlotte Yeh, Regional Administrator of CMS, will help answer the question, "What do we see in the health care marketplace specifically as a result of pay-for-performance incentives?" Dr. Marc Roberts, Harvard School of Public Health, a most provocative speaker, will moderate a panel of researchers and practitioners addressing the "gap between theory and performance".

And we are especially excited that Dr. Sam Thier, former President of IOM when "Crossing the Quality Chasm" was published, will be keynote speaker at the evening's dinner.

We hope to see you there.

John H. Knowles, Jr.
Executive Director

Stroke, Evidence-based medicine, and Pay-for-performance

"Public reporting and pay for performance for stroke is around the corner," said Dr. Lee Schwamm, a member of the American Stroke Association's Advisory Committee. "So it's time to get on this."

Providing high quality, comprehensive stroke services offers hospital administrators that rare opportunity in life – doing well by doing good. Evidence-based guidelines and performance measures allow well-managed stroke programs to save lives and improve outcomes. But a movement towards pay-for-performance and other accountability measures in this area means that improving stroke performance is key to adding to and maintaining the bottom line. Read More...

Beverly Hospital: One hospital's experience with IHM stroke data

The Institute for Health Metrics is easing the data collection burden at hospitals who use it to manage their stroke programs, freeing up time and resources to better manage patient care...

Ann Pianka, Stroke Program Manager at Beverly Hospital in Massachusetts, used to sift through hundreds of paper files to find the 40 or so stroke and TIA patients she needed to track. She also used emergency room and admission logs as well as computer runs to help identify patients. But IHM data allows her to find patients with specific diagnoses in a single place, cutting down on the detective work and helping her identify patients she'd missed. Read More...

What some are doing with stroke data

If you are starting or improving a comprehensive stroke program, it helps to have insight from those already doing it.... Read More...

About Us

The Institute for Health Metrics is a privately funded not-for-profit organization focused on developing an electronic data analytics system to support quality and operational improvement in hospitals and research in public health and healthcare services.

As a central component of its mission, IHM works with a network of leading hospitals and researchers to organize and analyze health information as part of a variety of programs to support quality of care research, measurement, and improvement. We are a trusted intermediary among hospitals who are our business associates in compliance with applicable HIPAA regulations.